


Dream A Little Dream Of Me

by unicornpoe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Amputee Bucky Barnes, Bucky went to war, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, Fluff, Happy Steve Bingo, Love Confessions, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, but Steve didn't, in glasses !!, internalized ableism, soft, they're ~vintage~
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 02:43:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20940980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: Steve turns, wiping his hands on the ragged dish towel he holds, and Bucky can’t even smile—Because here’s a truth: when Bucky was strapped to that table in Italy, and when Bucky was crouched in muddy trenches while bullets whistled overhead, and when Bucky was dying in a hospital bed, thrashing with a fever, he resolved to tell Steve if he made it out alive, because he couldn’t bear the idea of leaving this earth behind without Steve ever having known that Bucky loves him.***After the war, Bucky comes home.





	Dream A Little Dream Of Me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the square "Hugs" for Happy Steve Bingo 2019!
> 
> Oh boy they're so happy in this one!! The softness may have murdered me!! I might be writing this from beyond the grave!!

It’s different; that’s what Bucky thinks, when he steps off of the ship, when he looks out over the crowd of people waiting with open arms. Different like a shirt feels different after you’ve grown out of it. Different in a way that lets you know maybe it’s you that’s changed. 

There are hundreds of faces before him, thousands, and he doesn’t recognize one. 

The men flooding off of the gangplank behind Bucky jostle him and he stumbles slightly, not quite used to the way his center of balance has shifted since he lost the arm. He accepts the clap on the shoulder he gets in apology with a grin that gets bigger the longer he lets it rest on his face, until his smile is spread wider than it’s been the whole four years he was away. 

He’s home. Maybe he doesn’t fit here the same way he did when he was younger and whole, but he still fits here better than he’s ever fit anywhere else, and the certainty of that washes over him in joy. 

“Bucky!”

He turns—and how hadn’t he seen them before? Pushing through the crowd, his ma and pop, Becca, and god almighty how she’s grown, and Lydia and Mary and he almost falls to his knees when he sees them, because he’s missed them so much that he wears that feeling like a second skin. 

His duffel slips off of his shoulder, slapping down onto the ground in a puff of dirt. He holds out his arm. 

They collide into him, a tangle of Barnses. Somebody’s crying and Bucky can’t tell who—hell, it might be him—and everybody else is laughing or calling his name, and he’s trapped under his ma’s elbow and Becca’s arms and his old man’s chin wedged in the top of his head, and it’s better than anything he could’ve imagined. 

He laughs, too. They’ve always been a close family, and this is always how it’s been: no room to breathe, knees knocking, up in each other’s faces. It’s what he knows. It’s what he loves. 

Bucky pulls back just a little, just so he can see their faces shining up at him, and the feeling of it all hits him right in the back of the throat, settles into a knot in his chest; they’re the same, but changed. Like holding the negatives of a photo on top of the actual thing, slightly offset, so it’s jarring. He wants to cry. 

But then, “Bucky!” Mary says, her little eyes wide, her smile hug, and pokes him in the ribs right where it tickles. “You’re skinny!” she says.

They all laugh, Bucky a little ruefully. He appreciates how none of them have commented on his changed appearance yet, because he knows he looks vastly different. There’s the lack of a limb, of course, but he spent three months in a POW camp in Italy, and then three more in a hospital, so he knows he doesn’t look good. Too pale. Too thin. His eyes dark and sad. 

He’s glad they recognized him. Sometimes, when he glances in windows and puddles on accident, he doesn’t recognize himself. 

“You’re one to talk, shrimp,” he teases back, keeping his voice gentle as he grins down at her and flicks the end of her braid. She squirms, laughing, but latches onto his hand and holds tight. 

“Neither of you are a skinny as me,” comes a voice, and Bucky’s heart stops in his chest as he looks beyond the little clump of his family. 

Steve. 

Hands in the pockets of his slacks, head tipped to the side, a soft, solem little smile playing about the corners of his mouth. He’s wearing glasses, thin silver frames that look good on his delicate face, and Bucky’s so glad that he was finally able to get them. Bucky’d been saving up for a pair for Steve, before he’d been shipped out. He looks healthier; his face is filled out just a tiny bit more, his cheeks flushed, his blue eyes round and bright. His jacket is a little big in the shoulders, a little long in the wrists, just like it always is, and his fair hair falls down across his forehead in the angle that Bucky has memorized, and that bump in his nose is the same, and cut glass angle of his jaw, and  _ here  _ is all the missing Bucky had been trying to keep himself from doing while he was away, pounding over him in wave after wave after wave. 

“Hi, Buck,” Steve says softly. That low voice, so surprising coming out of a guy like him. Bucky’s favorite sound in the world. 

Bucky takes half a step forward, and Steve meets him the rest of the way, sliding his hands around Bucky’s waist as he hauls him in close. 

Steve smells like coffee, and ink, and the soap that they used to share. Bucky thinks:  _ I’d know you anywhere.  _

“God,” Bucky hears himself say, and his voice is thick, and he hides his wet eyes in the top of Steve’s head. “God, I missed you, punk.”

Steve is quiet, but Bucky can feel his warm breath on the side of his neck, settling like a cloud. Steve’s fingers press hard into the dip of his spine, right above the waistline of Bucky’s uniform slacks, tight like he’s afraid Bucky will turn into dust in his hands. Low in Bucky’s gut, something heated shifts. 

Bucky thinks about the letters sitting like stones in the inside pocket of his jacket. He thinks of rows upon rows of Steve’s cramped, spiky handwriting. He thinks of what Steve would say, if he knew that Bucky carried them with him everywhere. 

Steve pulls away, or maybe someone pries him off of Bucky; for a blip of a moment, it’s just the two of them, facing each other, a little bit of distance between them—and then Bucky is swarmed by his family once again, and the hubbub of all of them floods through his ears, and Steve’s soft blue eyes drift away, like clouds. 

***

Bucky’s ma and the girls cooked dinner—something special, even though it isn’t Sunday, even though it doesn’t really seem like the war’s over yet—and the neighbors come over, and aunts and uncles and cousins, and for a few hours it feels just like Bucky’s eighteen again, and nothing worse than a back-alley bully has ever touched him. 

Steve is there. He’s right in the middle of things: laughing with Bucky’s dad across the table, helping Bucky’s ma serve everyone, teasing Becca and Mary and Lydia. He fits right in just like he’s always done, as much a part of the Barnes family as any of the rest of them. 

Bucky can’t keep his eyes off him. 

He’s always been bad at that, at pretending like Steve wasn’t the only bright thing in the room he wanted to focus his energy on—but he’s worse now. Now that he’s been out of practice for so long. He finds himself staring at the way the light above the table splashes down on Steve’s fair head, turning his hair bright, like a star; he finds himself watching the shape of Steve’s smile when he laughs, and he’s struck by how much he wants that laugh to be directed at him, even though that yearning really shouldn’t surprise him anymore. He’s always been sick for Steve’s attention, Steve’s praise, and it’s sadly obvious that not a damn thing has changed. 

Bucky looks away, willing himself not to flush with… with embarrassment, or shame, or sheer, uncontainable desire. It must not work: his ma leans across the table, a little bit of that concern he knows they must all be battling to shutter away peering through the cracks of her expression, and touches the side of his face with the back of her hand.

“I’m fine, ma,” he says, and he wants to pull away, but he doesn’t, because it’s been so fucking long since anyone that he loves has touched him, and every inch of his skin is trembling for contact. It makes tears spring to his eyes again, the softness of his ma’s hands on his skin, the care in her eyes, and he looks away. 

“Tell me if you want them to leave, James,” she says, and he takes her hand and presses it in his own and does his best to smile. 

***

An hour later, and what had felt close and warm and blinding is now wearing on Bucky’s bones, making him slump against the wall in exhaustion that’s less physical than emotional. 

He hasn’t seen Steve for at least half an hour, and he hasn’t spoken to him since Steve greeted him at the harbor. It’s his body’s natural instinct to go looking for him. 

Bucky’s Uncle Harold claps him on his good shoulder as Bucky slips out of the room, a wide smile on his face, and they have a conversation that Bucky doesn’t remember the words of even as it’s going on, too close and too friendly and too loud. He spies Becca over the top of Harold’s head, catches her eye; she nods at him, and swoops in to draw Harold away by the elbow, and Bucky breathes a deep sigh of relief. 

The loud sounds from the living room fade into the background as Bucky walks slowly down the hallway, and the muffled ambience of it makes that loose, rambling thing in his chest go still again. There’s a light on in the kitchen, spilling out like gold into the dark hallway, and Bucky heads toward that, focused on the faint rush of running water and the quiet clink of dishes. 

He rounds the corner and—Steve. Bent over the kitchen sink, his head down as he hums quietly off-key, every knob of his spine showing now that he’s abandoned his too-big jacket, and Bucky wants to walk straight over to him and curve over his back like a parenthesis and never, ever move. 

The sight of him makes Bucky’s breath bottle up in his throat. He wants to move, but he can’t; his feet are stuck to the floor with the force of this thing; his mind is throwing pictures at him of a thousand evenings he’d come home to his and Steve’s shared apartment and seen Steve exactly like this, before the war. Suspenders hanging loose by his thighs, shirtsleeves rolled up, the fine and bright hairs standing spare over his slender forearms. 

Steve turns, wiping his hands on the ragged dish towel he holds, and Bucky can’t even smile— 

Because here’s a truth: when Bucky was strapped to that table in Italy, and when Bucky was crouched in muddy trenches while bullets whistled overhead, and when Bucky was dying in a hospital bed, thrashing with a fever, he resolved to tell Steve if he made it out alive, because he couldn’t bear the idea of leaving this earth behind without Steve ever having known that Bucky loves him. 

But now—god, now—Bucky is here, alive, and Steve is here, alive, and Bucky can’t think of anything more terrifying than those three words, because there is nothing more precious to him than Steve, and that phrase has the power to lose him forever. 

“You ok, Buck?” Steve asks him quietly. He keeps wiping his hands on that towel: over the ridge of each knuckle, between his long fingers, across his pale palms. His eyes are on Bucky though, as powerful as floodlights, as warm as hearthfires. 

“Tired,” Bucky says honestly. He wants, irrationally, to take Steve’s hand. Just hold it. Firm and real. “Couldn’t find you, so I came lookin’.”

Steve doesn’t smile with his full face very often, but Bucky will treasure every little lift of his lips that he can get. “I ducked out,” Steve says. He tosses the rag onto the counter, leaning back against it with his hands holding his elbows, arms resting above the sharp points of his hip bones. “Lotsa dishes build up when you’re eating with the Barnes family.”

Bucky nods. Comes closer. Watches the way Steve’s eyebrows soften, slope up over his glasses gently as he smiles, and almost trips over his own damn feet to get all the way next to him. He leans back against the counter next to Steve, eyes on his face, and Steve shuffles closer until they’re pressed together from thigh to hip to shoulder. 

Steve still has to tilt his chin up to look Bucky in the eye, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. Bucky stares at the way his eyelashes brush his cheekbones when he blinks. 

“How you been, Buck?” Steve asks softly. 

It’s a funny question: Steve knows the real answer, anyway. It’s the kind of question Bucky can lie in answer to, and Bucky appreciates that. 

“Oh, not bad,” he says. “For the end of the world.”

He feels Steve’s laugh more than he hears it, a soft huff of breath, and then Steve turns in toward him and pulls him in with two grabby hands on his waist again, and Bucky shiver-sighs as he lets Steve manhandle him into whatever position he wants. 

“Because we got cut short,” Steve says, like he needs to justify anything to Bucky, like Bucky wouldn’t spend the last of his living days in exactly this position with no argument. Steve nestles his head beneath Bucky’s chin, one hand still firmly on his waist and one pressed between Bucky’s shoulder blades, and Bucky goes dizzy with  _ something _ as he wraps his arm around Steve and rests his chin on the top of Steve’s head. 

They stand like that for a while, quiet. Bucky squeezes his eyes shut as tight as they’ll go, privately thrilling at every square inch of his body that touches Steve. 

They fit together perfectly. Bucky still fits here, beside him, perfectly. 

He didn’t think he’d ever get this again. 

And now that he has it—he can’t risk it. He just can’t. Maybe that makes him a goddamn coward, that telling his best friend that he loves him is scarier than facing an army of Nazis, that the prospect of losing Steve Rogers is more devastating than death, but Bucky’s never claimed to be the brave one. Steve is the brave one, even if nobody but Bucky sees it. And Steve doesn’t feel like that. 

He doesn’t deserve to have the whole force of Bucky’s love thrust upon him. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, and it takes Bucky a moment to register that he’s been spoken to: the word drifts through the miasma of his brain slowly, lagging to be comprehended. Steve pulls back to look Bucky in the eye, a line of concern between his eyebrows, and slides the hand on Bucky’s back up to rest on his shoulder. “Do you need to sit down, pal?”

It takes Bucky too long to understand why Steve’s asking: he’s shaking. His hand, his breath, the beating of his heart. Steve tries to step away, and Bucky panics, hand flexing where it’s gripped in the loose fabric of Steve’s shirt, holding him tight. 

Sometimes, Bucky thinks Steve must know. It’s so obvious, the way Bucky looks at him talks to him touches him; so obvious, and yet nobody’s ever said a word. 

“No,” Bucky says, too quiet: he’s never been a quiet man, and now he can’t possibly remember how to be loud. Things have been too loud for too long. He thinks maybe he just made the shape of the word with his lips, and didn’t actually say anything at all. “Just glad to be home, Stevie.”

Steve looks like he wants to say something (Bucky’s traitorous heart, kicking in mislead anticipation) but switches tracks at the last moment, and that’s unusual, because Steve is nothing if not resolved. He never backs down. 

He’s backing down now. His eyes trace Bucky’s face like he’s searching for something, and his hands on Bucky’s body are soft and careful, and he doesn’t say what he wants to say. 

“We’re glad you’re home, too, Bucky,” he murmurs.  _ We.  _ “This whole city missed you something fierce.”

Bucky knows that isn’t true. He was no more missed than any of the other thousands of young men that left, and is less missed than the thousands that didn’t get a chance to come back home. He doesn’t care, though, not as long as he was missed by the people he missed back. 

“Even you?” 

He tries to ask it like he’s teasing, but he hasn’t teased about anything in a long, long while, and it falls flat. 

Steve’s small, fine-boned and delicate to look at, but right now, he’s the one with all the strength. “Especially me,” he says, soft like maybe he believes he’s just thinking it and not speaking out loud at all. 

Bucky wishes he could stop tearing up, but he’s always been a crybaby, and it doesn’t seem likely to change now. He ducks his chin, hiding his face, and Steve squeezes his hip and lets him. 

“So,” Steve says, all casual, like they aren’t clinging to each other in the Barnes family kitchen as a party roars on right down the hallway. He turns his head, voice lowering, so he can speak right into Bucky’s ear. “You got a place to live, Barnes?”

“I, uh,” says Bucky, and then stalls out. “Haven’t really thought about it,” is what he says, instead of saying  _ sweetheart, I didn’t even think I was gonna make it back home alive.  _

“Right,” says Steve. He finally does step completely away, and Bucky hates himself for the way he wants to dart across the foot that separates them and snatch Steve back close again, because he should be happy with how much time close to him that he just got. “My roommate moved out a few weeks ago. You need some place, you come to me, yeah?”

“Stevie,” Bucky says, and he feels the smile spreading across his face, slow and sweet, and it matches the warmth in his stomach so he doesn’t stop it. “You askin’ me for help?”

They both know that’s not what Steve’s doing. Steve could find another roommate, easy; he didn’t need to wait for Bucky, and he doesn’t need to ask him now. But he did. He is. 

“Don’t need help from anyone, Buck,” Steve says. His voice goes a little deeper when he’s pushing back laughter, sweet and easy on Bucky’s ears. “I’m offering  _ you _ help, you mook. You gonna take me up on it or not?”

How could a fella ever refuse an offer like that one, sweetlips?” Bucky says, and thinks,  _ how indeed? _

Steve grins. He still hides behind those unruly bangs when he really lets his expression go like that, and Bucky still itches to brush them away from his round eyes. 

“Can’t,” Steve says. “You’ve always been immune to me anyway.”

***

Bucky can’t walk down the street without somebody calling his name. 

He didn’t use to mind, before. He likes people, he likes to talk to them; he doesn’t like the way people’s eyes skitter away from the obvious place where his left arm should hang, and he doesn’t like the pity in their gazes, and he doesn’t like their too-loud voices and their too-close smiles. He goes out with Becca, or Lydia, or his ma; lets them deflect, lets them answer for him, ignores the way they look at him, too close. Hopes he isn’t a disappointment now. Feels like he’s a disappointment now. 

Steve meets Bucky at his apartment stoop, his hands in his pockets. June is rolling by them in a thick cloud, and fast-descending; Bucky sees the evidence of it in the way Steve’s bangs cling to his forehead with sweat, in the filmy sheen over his collar bones. 

“Hey,” Bucky says, jogging the last few steps until he’s standing on the sidewalk before Steve, head tipped back to look up at him. Steve’s a good six inches taller than him in this position, and Bucky kinda likes it, kinda likes feeling like he’d have to reach for Steve if Steve wanted him to. 

“You’re late,” Steve says. Short and sharp, but there’s a grin somewhere in those words, so Bucky just smiles up at him and hefts his duffel full of everything he owns further up onto his shoulder. 

“Some things never change, Stevie,” he says. 

Steve rolls his eyes, and reaches out with one hand, fixing the collar of Bucky’s shirt where it’s bunched up under the duffel straps. “Guess not,” he says. 

Bucky swallows. They go inside. 

Steve’s on the third floor, which makes Bucky frown thunderously. Not ‘cause he minds; Steve could live on top of the Empire State Building and Bucky’d still move in with him, no questions asked. But he knows how Steve’s heart acts up and his asthma kicks in when he has to climb too many steps, especially when the air is too thick to breathe. 

He’d  _ hoped _ that maybe Steve would take care of himself until Bucky got back and could do it for him. Clearly, that was naive. 

Steve catches his glower and looks away fast, his cheeks going pink with more than just exertion. He gets that furiously determined look behind the round frames of his glasses, eyes fixed on his feet as he lifts them one after the other. One, two; one, two. 

“Jesus Christ,” Bucky says in half-fond exasperation, staring at the strip of Steve’s neck above his shirt that’s going cherry red. “You don’t hafta be such a martyr all the time, punk.”

“I’m  _ fine, _ ” Steve says, and god, those’re probably the two most frequently spoken words by Steve G. Rogers, even though they’re also definitely the most false. “It was best thing I could find for the kinda money I’ve got.”

Bucky squints at him as they reach their floor, leaning back against the wall as he watches Steve unlock the door. “Thought you were making better money teaching?”

Steve teaches drawing part time at the local community college, Bucky’s learned, and works the newspaper stand on his days off from there. It explains where he got the funds for those spiffy new glasses. Bucky is unspeakably proud of him. 

“Well shit, Buck,” Steve says, nudging the door open and leading Bucky inside with a look cast over his shoulder. “Not a lotta people need to learn to draw while there’s a war going on.”

They wander into the living room, and Bucky tosses his duffel onto the couch before he collapses back into the cushions himself. The room is clean and spare, and it smells musty and like Steve, and there’s a crack running down the whole length of the ceiling, and Bucky can’t stop smiling. 

“Dunno, Stevie,” he muses, grinning at Steve until Steve sits down on the little bit of exposed cushion next to him, curling up with his feet tucked under himself. “I think every guy fighting would’ve appreciated getting one of those pretty drawings in the mail like you always sent me. Hell, they were always the best part of my week.”

It’s more honest than Bucky meant to be. He’s just happy, here with Steve, and drowsy in the mid-afternoon heat, and he couldn’t have stopped himself from saying that if he’d tried. 

Plus, Steve is flushing again, the pink spread so pretty over his thin cheeks, and that’s one of Bucky’s favorite sights in the world. 

“Yeah, but that’s just you, Buck,” Steve mumbles. He pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, not shy because he’s never been shy, but conscious of himself. Conscious of the space between them, of the words they’re sharing. It makes Bucky want to lean into him even more than he usually does. More quietly, he meets Bucky’s eyes, and he smiles. “I’m glad you liked them.”

Bucky doesn’t say that he would have liked anything Steve sent him, even if it was just a paper napkin with his name scrawled on it, because Steve had touched it first. That’s plain old crazy. He doesn’t say that. 

“‘Course I did,” he says. His duffel is between them on the couch, so he can’t reach over and set his palm on Steve’s slender thigh like he wants to. That’s probably a good thing. “I saved them all, you know.”

Absurdly, Bucky is the one to feel his face go red here, Bucky is the one who looks away and down into his lap and still can’t get the blistering heat of Steve’s electric-blue gaze off of his skin. He stares down at his hand picking at the fabric over his knee, warm and slightly annoyed about it, and he is trying so hard not to pay attention to Steve on his right that he nearly jumps out of his skin when Steve leans over the duffel and sets his hand on Bucky’s. 

Bucky can’t help the shiver that runs from the back of his neck all the way down his spine. He just can’t. It feels so  _ good _ . 

“Steve—” Bucky starts, probably sounding ridiculous—half-asleep form the sun, half out of his mind with the warm, fuzzy feeling that’s running over every inch of his skin, half-giddy because he hasn’t had this in so long, half-convinced that it isn’t really happening at all—but he doesn’t know where this sentence is going, and based on the quiet laugh Steve aims his way, Steve can tell. 

“It’s a good thing you saved them,” says Steve. For a moment Bucky has no idea in the world what he’s talking about, too caught up in watching him nudge Bucky’s duffel off the couch until it lands on the floor with a thunk, too caught up in the way he’s moving closer until his skinny arm is wrapped around Bucky’s wide shoulders and Bucky’s head is resting against the side of Steve’s neck. Bucky’s brain is a solid sheet of white noise. “Paper and graphite aren’t cheap.”

Bucky makes a noise that sounds like he shoved all of the vowels in the alphabet together into one word, melting into Steve’s side like an ice cream cone under the sun. He doesn’t even care that Steve’s laughing at him; Steve’s running his long fingers through the hair at the back of Bucky’s neck, too, over and over again like a rhythm, and that more than makes up for it. 

“I’ll buy you all the paper and graphite you want Stevie, I will, I,” Bucky says, not bothering to hide how obviously he’s pushing up into Steve’s touch like a hungry cat, seeking contact, aching for it. 

Steve’s lips are close to Bucky’s hairline. Just hovering. Breathing a warm cloud of sweet air there. Bucky’s heart gives a low, lazy throb. 

They used to sit like this all the time, before everything. Tangled on the couch cushions, limbs locked, Bucky folded up as small as he could make himself and Steve touching every inch of him, sighing sweet things into Bucky’s skin. It isn’t something fellas do with other fellas: Bucky knows this, and he knows that Steve knows this, so they’ve never talked about it and they never will, because it’s been the best part of Bucky’s day since he was sixteen years old and didn’t know how to wield the jagged feeling springing to life in his heart. 

“I know,” Steve says, so quiet. When Bucky breathes in deep, he can smell the earth-dusty scent of the pastels Steve favors imbedded in the sleeves of his shirt, and the little damp spots of sweat in the crook of his neck and the dip of his shoulders. It is unequivocally the scent of home. More than anything. “I know you would.”

They are quiet. There’s a clock sitting on the table by the couch, and the ticks fade into a soothing rhythm, mixing with the pound of Steve’s heart beneath Bucky’s ear until he can’t tell the two apart. 

Sun is soaking heavy into Bucky’s bones. It’s hot, tangled up in Steve like this, basking in summertime glow like this, and he doesn’t care, doesn’t care, doesn’t care… 

***

Bucky gets an office job a few blocks away. He knows they hired him because they looked at his empty shoulder and guessed (correctly) that this is one of the few things he can do with only one arm, but he’s always been good with figures, too, and that’s what he tells himself. This is good. He’ll be helpful there. He’s making his own money, just like he did when all of him was in one piece, and he can go right back to taking care of Steve, he can go right back to how things should be. 

Except the hours are so long. The hours are so long, and he hasn’t had to sit still in a little room like this since he left school, and he’s all alone up here at his desk, just him and stacks of papers and the new shirt he had to buy because his old one is too big now, and the collar that scratches at his neck— 

When he gets home, Bucky is shaking apart at the seams of his skin. 

“That you, Buck?” Steve calls out from the kitchen, pleasant, warm, and Bucky wants to go to him very badly, but: 

But suddenly he finds that he can’t move past this spot, right here, on the floor. This spot that he sinks down to, his legs crossed, his heart galloping. 

There’s the rattle of dishes in the sink; the next room over. A brief silence, and then footsteps, and then: Steve, appearing ‘round the corner, the careful frown of concern on his face deepening when he spies Bucky on the floor. 

“Bucky,” says Steve, just that, only that: Bucky. His eyes, his ocean-floor eyes, they’re suddenly very close, and then his hand touches the hollow part of Bucky’s cheek as he kneels down in his work slacks. 

“Sorry,” Bucky says. He really, very much is. He’s been doing well, he thinks. He’s been doing so good, especially since he moved back in with Steve, so good at not letting his arm bother him, at pushing back the memories that climb in around the edges of his brain, at acting like there’s nothing wrong. He doesn’t want Steve to know that something’s wrong. Steve isn’t the one that has to take care of Bucky, that’s not how they work, that’s not what should happen and. And. 

“Don’t—” says Steve, close, “you don’t have to—”

“It’s just,” Bucky breathes shakily, collecting one of Steve’s hands in his own and pulling it, unthinking, to his chest, “there’s nobody else up there with me. It’s so quiet. I’m so  _ alone.” _

Steve gets that look again: that look like he wants to say something, but doesn’t know how. Doesn’t know if he should. Bucky wants him to. Bucky wants him.

“You don’t like being alone,” Steve murmurs. It’s a rhetorical statement; anyone who knows Bucky Barnes knows that he hates being alone. Fears being lonely. Fears it more than maybe anything. 

(That was the worst part, although he will never admit it. That was the worst part of being trapped there, of being tortured there. The room was empty when his captors weren’t present, ringing with the emptiness, ringing with the sounds he made. Nobody spoke to him. Nobody touched him. He barely remembered his own name, by the time he got out.)

( _ I dreamed of you,  _ Bucky thinks, watching the long pale lines of Steve’s hands, the tender knob of his knuckles.  _ Every night while I was away, I dreamed of you.  _ It’s true. He did.)

(Steve, an angel emblazoned in white and gold, arched over him like a savior. That’s what Bucky dreamed of, no matter how much he hurt.)

“You don’t have to…” Steve starts again, then stops. He’s touching Bucky all over, curling his palm over the narrow angle of Bucky’s waist. It steadies some of the sick, swaying awfulness in Bucky’s throat. He shivers. “You’re so good at helping me,” Steve murmurs. There’s a smile trying to bloom at the corner of his mouth. Bucky cannot  _ breathe.  _ “You can let me take care of you a little. If you want to. Please.”

The awfulness from this afternoon is melting away like candle wax, revealing Bucky’s center: this round, golden, brilliant place named  _ Steve  _ that lives inside of him, this place that longs to make him happy, this place that longs for the touch of Steve’s fingers on Bucky’s skin. He feels white-gold, and burning. 

“You’ve been gone so long,” Steve is saying, his eyes dappled-lake-topaz, his eyelashes rejecting the confines of his glasses and brushing the lenses like bird wings. “And before that, my whole life, you’ve just… oh, you’re lovely, did you know that?” He does smile. It’s a breathless and compulsive smile, and Bucky  _ feels  _ it. “You’re lovely. And you’re lonely, and you shouldn’t be, and  _ let me _ , please, Buck.”

“I missed you,” Bucky says. Can’t stop saying. Will say every damn day of his remaining life. He is sitting here, his tie loose around his throat, his hair summer-rain-damp, and Steve’s words etched into his heart, and oh, oh, oh he missed him. “Steve.”

“You’re all bruised on the edges, honey,” Steve murmurs, brushing Bucky’s cheek with his knuckles, so soft that it hits Bucky like a punch. “Let me help?”

“Yes,” Bucky says. Breathes. Sighs. So shaky that it barely makes noise. The most certain certainty. 

“ _ God, _ ” Steve says, swaying forward on his knees. He drops his arms around Bucky’s shoulders, uses one of those hands to cup the back of Bucky’s skull, and he kisses him. 

Soft. So soft, and Bucky sinks into it like a patch of sunlight, like a hug. His spine is a long, liquid trail of sunlight now, making his body loose and pliant and utterly Steve’s, to do with as he likes: Steve likes him close. Steve likes kissing him. Bucky can tell. 

Bucky breathes a sound when their lips part, shivering all over in the good kind of way that he never, ever expected. His forehead drops to the dip of Steve’s shoulder, and Steve laughs with Bucky in his arms, completely joyful. 

“Get up,” Steve says into the hair curling from humidity over Bucky’s temple. “Let’s get you up off this floor…”

“Steve,” Bucky says once Steve has him standing, touching the feather of his bangs down across his forehead. He feels like a supernova, a star exploding from the inside out. He feels… brave. “I have to tell you.”

Steve smile is so completely wonderful. He’s steering Bucky toward the couch, they’re sinking down onto it, Steve’s mouthing careful promises into Bucky’s chin and lips and cheeks, and Bucky thinks maybe he died back there in Italy after all, because there’s no way—there’s absolutely no way—that he’s this lucky. 

“Then tell me,” Steve says. 

And it isn’t difficult, in the end. The moment has been building and building, gathering steam inside of Bucky’s heart for over a decade. By the time it slips free, it’s the truest thing that’s ever been, and Bucky knows he will never mean anything more. 

He doesn’t have time to choose the perfect words. Words don’t exist for something like this, maybe. He uses the ones that feel closest to right. 

“I love you,” he says. His voice tumbles free of his chest, pours down into Steve. Steve looks so happy that the expression is almost sorrow. “I have since… I always have. Forever. I said I’d tell you, if I lived.” He swallows, tight. Steve is holding, gently, the back of his neck. So he’s alright. “I lived. So I’m telling you now. God, I love you.”

Another kiss. This one longer, deeper, and it goes until the brightness building deep in Bucky’s stomach is so hot he almost cannot bear it, until Steve has toppled Bucky back onto the couch cushions and he’s resting in the curve of Bucky’s legs, and Bucky is floating, is warm and dizzy and present all at once. 

“The letters,” Bucky says. He’s breathless, and he doesn’t care. His hands are wound up tight in Steve’s shirt, spread over the unthinkingly elegant planes of his scapula. “I kept them all. The whole time. Every single thing you sent me…”

Steve kisses the point of Bucky’s chin. It’s silly, and strange, and perfect, and Bucky’s in love. “Yours too,” Steve says. Senseless. If Bucky could climb into the hollow cavern of Steve’s chest and exist there forever, he would, but he settles for this small and safe feeling of being pressed down into the couch cushions by Steve’s insignificant weight. His hip bones dig into Bucky’s stomach. It’s perfect. “When they stopped coming, I. I’ve never been so afraid.”

This is no small thing. In all the years Bucky has known him—so very, very many years—Steve Rogers has never once been afraid. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky starts, and Steve kisses him before he can finish. It’s fierce and a little bit rough, and Bucky’s stomach flips, flips, flips. 

“No,” Steve says against Bucky’s lips. “Hush, baby.”

Bucky thinks:  _ oh.  _

“You came back,” Steve says, “to me. And that’s all that matters.”

“Even though I’m not in once piece?” Bucky asks, his mouth quirking ruefully beneath Steve’s. 

Steve pulls back. Bucky chases him halfheartedly, but there’s no urgency behind it; he knows Steve won’t stay up there for long. 

“You’re in all the pieces you need to be,” says Steve. This, too, is fierce. A sentence emblazoned into the air between them. “You’re perfect.”

Bucky’s toes curl in the shoes he’s still—ridiculously—wearing. He’s flushing hot, and he knows it, and Steve—Steve runs a knuckle down the notch of Bucky’s jaw, turns that nimble wrist and strokes upward along the velvet-soft arch of Bucky’s cheek. Blinks down at him, long and slow and soft. 

“I missed you,” Bucky says again, and he keeps saying it, over and over and over again, until some of that stabbing ache fades away. 

***

They move Bucky’s desk down a floor, and it isn’t that different, not really, not so much that it shocks him, but it’s—better. People bustle to and fro past him now, always with a wave or a smile or a word, and Bucky soaks up the contact like a flower to the sun. 

And then, when he gets home—Steve. Steve. Steve. 

“I love you,” Steve tells him, one late-summer night when a tiny bit of chill seeps in around the window frame, not enough to pour beneath the covers, but enough that it’s necessary to curl up around each other completely. Steve’s head is resting on Bucky’s bare chest, and he speaks into the hollow of his throat. Low and rough. A promise. “I don’t think I ever said.”

And Bucky knows—but still. 

He closes his eyes tight, until the lamplight just glows orange through his eyelids, until all he can feel is Steve, and all he can hear is the rhythm of their breaths. He might cry, just a little, but neither of them feel the need to mention that. It doesn’t bother him anymore, in any case. 

It doesn’t take long before they’re both asleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come cry with me on twitter @unicornpoe I will make you feel better about being sad and show you lots of pictures of my cats


End file.
